Enterprise desktop image management is one of the most challenging tasks for Information Technology (IT) departments of large organizations today. A typical IT department needs to manage, protect, and distribute software updates and modifications, upgrade operating systems and applications, as well as be able to back up and restore the user's data and settings on demand One issue for IT departments is the complexity of managing a large number of different desktop instances that may exist on the computers of enterprise users. The sheer number of user computers to manage; the proliferation of operating system (OS) images and applications; and the complex set of operations, such as deployment, provisioning, patching, upgrading, installing and managing applications, compliance testing, troubleshooting and re-imaging; all make IT responsibilities a very challenging task. To compound these difficulties, today's enterprises are often dispersed over multiple geographic locations and the use of Local Area Networks (LANs) connected over one or more Wide Area Networks (WANs) with variable bandwidths and latencies is a serious barrier to providing efficient desktop management without sacrificing end user experience.
A number of software tools exist to aid IT departments in the endeavor of desktop image management. For example, numerous backup and restore software programs can be installed on individual desktops (e.g., an employee's laptop or desktop PC) and these programs typically utilize a client software program installed on the desktop that runs on a schedule (e.g., once per day or at night while computers aren't in use). The client program typically collects, compresses, encrypts, and transfers the data to a remote backup service provider's servers or other off-site storage devices. Such backup and restore tools help IT departments ensure that most user data is not lost or can be recovered, however, a number of difficulties and inconveniences with desktop management still persist.
One particular area of concern addressed by this disclosure arises in situations when individual users are running a hosted hypervisor on their device, such as in situations commonly referred to as “bring your own device”, where employees are permitted to bring their own individually owned device to work and utilize it as a work device to access privileged company information and applications. Hypervisors enable the creation and execution of virtual machines (VMs), which are software emulations of real physical computers. Each VM may include its own guest operating system, applications and configuration, similar to a physical computer. For example, a single user's computer may be running separate VMs to represent their “personal computer” and “work computer” which might contain sensitive data of the organization and so on. In some cases, a single user's computer may run a fairly large number of VMs that all share the hardware resources of the computer, which presents a multitude of challenges for IT departments that wish to backup, restore, upgrade and manage all or some of these VMs.